The first party studios at PlayStation are allegedly upset over the GAAS focused direction taken up by the company.
In his latest video on YouTube, David Jaffe, father of the God of War series, mentioned hearing from multiple sources that first party studios at PlayStation are unhappy with the direction the company has taken with regards to its focus on the development of GAAS titles.
According to Jaffe, PlayStation President Jim Ryan was convinced that GAAS was the future of gaming and pivoted PlayStation first party studios to work on them. PlayStation studios were unhappy about this new direction. Furthermore, he said that the alleged cancellation of The Last of Us Factions multiplayer game from Naughty Dog made a lot of PlayStation studios upset, resulting in internal turmoil.
Jaffe’s sources told him that Sony pinned the entire blame on Producer Connie Booth and fired her, as well as the vast majority of people who worked under her. Additionally, he mentioned that Head of PlayStation studios Herman Hulst was in favor of cutting off all of the Japanese studios. He also pointed out that his contact wasn’t a big fan of Hulst.
Amidst the alleged internal turmoil is the recent report of layoffs at PlayStation. According to the Linkedin posts from , who was a Senior Level Designer on an unannounced project at PlayStation, and , who was a Senior Technical Recruiter at PlayStation, several employees at Sony Interactive Entertainment have been hit by a recent wave of layoffs.
This is the third reported wave of layoffs at PlayStation. Recently, in October, 2023, Linkedin profiles of Markos Orfanos, Quality Assurance Tester / Dev Support at Naughty Dog, had revealed that the had laid off some of its contractual workers. Orfanos had worked as part of theEarlier, in May, 2023, former Project Coordinator at PlayStation Visual Arts, John Borba, had taken to Linkedin to share that the studio had been hit with layoffs as a result of a large pivot on the AAA multiplayer game it had been working on, and he was among the people who were let go to support the new budgetary needs.
